Recording Your Presentation

Okay, let’s get down to business. I know I’ve been building it up for about 10 pages, but the actual execution of a PowerPoint recording is surprisingly simple.

Here’s how you get started with recording a PowerPoint presentation:

1. Open PowerPoint. Open the presentation you want to record.

2. Click the Record button. The presentation will launch into Slide Show view.

3. A small box appears in the lower right-hand corner of your screen, reminding you of the hotkeys at your disposal as well as allowing a last-minute tweak of your recording volume (if you’re recording audio narration, that is). Click the Click to begin recording button.

4. The presentation (and recording) will begin in earnest. A large text graphic appears, which indicates recording:

   

That’s it. You’re recording your presentation. Just give the presentation as you would normally, maintaining the same pacing you’ve practiced. If you need to pause for any reason, you may do so by pressing the established hotkey (Ctrl+Shift-F9 by default). When paused, that small graphic box in the lower right-hand corner of your screen will reappear. It looks like this:

To unpause the recording, either click the button marked Click to resume recording or simply hit your Record/Pause hotkey again. If you are recording audio, be sure to speak loudly and clearly. You may wish to use a wireless lavaliere microphone so that you aren’t tethered to the podium. Also, do note that you may have to do some “creative cabling” to get your audio going to both your computer (for recording) and the PA system (so that your live audience can actually hear you). Fortunately, most conferences and business events have on-site technical staff who are usually happy to help. When you’ve finished your presentation, hit your Stop hotkey (or Esc if you have auto-stop set up) to stop the recording and return your presentation to Normal view.

Once you’ve stopped the capture, a dialog appears, asking you for a file name and location. If you chose in the Advanced dialog of the Camtasia Studio Add-In Options dialog to save your project as AVI/CAMPROJ, then two files will be created. Both will have the name you specified (i.e., myname.camproj and myname.avi).